Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (14 page)

‘…she’s been stuck at home too.’

There was little she could say no to when it came to Chris.

‘She can ride with Mel,’ she said grudgingly.

‘Really?’ I found it almost impossible to believe. ‘But papa and mei…’

‘Will get home and find us not there,’ Grace interrupted, ‘and we’ll get into trouble. Do you want to come or not?’

I nodded.

‘Put something warm on or you’ll freeze your ass off.’

I ran up to my room, two steps at a time, before they could change their minds.

They say you don’t ever forget your first love, your first kiss. I don’t know it if applies to your first motorbike ride. It didn’t change my life. But it gave me the first tremulous hint of how things could be different. Yes, that there were other ways of experiencing the world. So far, for me, that had been from the security of being on the inside—a car, a book, the judicious guidance of my parents. Cocooned in plastic and metal, in parched pages, within the arms of a suffocating love. And everything goes by, scenery and life, unfurling at a safe and careful distance, a flat democratic haze. Being outside is a step away from safety. On a motorbike, the world rushes up at you from all sides, so do the wind and the colours of the trees and the sky. You are exposed. The sunshine hits your back, your face, the air flies down your throat, and you are nothing but a single, glorious movement.

We wove our way out of our neighbourhood and into Laitumkhrah, usually a busy area with people bustling around the shops and large meat and vegetable bazaar. Today, the streets were almost empty, and we raced through them, weaving around traffic cones and a few clusters of pedestrians. I clung to Melvin madly, laughing out loud. We passed children playing games of football and cricket on the road, and grown-ups who looked at us with the greatest disdain. ‘Khynnah dkaid,’ I could almost hear them say and it thrilled me. This was better than any book, I thought. It was real. The roads were more desolate as we hit the outskirts of the town. I held on tight to Melvin’s leather jacket, trying not to let slip that, for me, this was as scary as it was exciting. I couldn’t wait to tell Anku; and then I remembered that the house next door lay empty. Suddenly, I wanted Melvin to go faster, and for the world to turn into a dazzling blur. In front of us, I could see Chris and Grace; her hair streaming in the wind, she leaned in to whisper in his ear. Then she half stood up and raised her arms in the air like an angel. She had her eyes closed. I would have liked to do the same but was afraid I’d fall off. Soon, we were far out of town, driving through rough, barren countryside marked with slabs of dark, layered rock. There were stretches of harvested fields and rows of thatched huts from where children would run to the side of the road and wave at us. I had no idea where we were headed, but it didn’t seem to matter. We were away from the disquiet that hung over Shillong, away from the confines of home and the watchful eyes of parents. All these years later, I look back on that day and know it was the afternoon I grew up.

Finally, the road narrowed and changed to a dirt track flanked on either side by tall, graceful bamboo. We took a sharp turn and stopped by an iron gate.

‘What’s this place?’ my sister asked.

‘You’ll see,’ Chris replied.

We walked to the top of the slope and when we reached, my sister and I gasped.

‘Welcome to Laitlum,’ said Chris and gestured melodramatically to the view.

We were standing on a field at the head of a valley, flanked by rows of jagged mountains that seemed to multiply themselves, growing higher and more distant, layering each other in shades of deep blue and green. The sight stretched far and endless, as though beyond lay mountains and nothing more of the world. It was quiet here too but, I noticed, this was different. The air was light and filled with late afternoon sunshine; it carried no heaviness nor remorse.

Grace laughed out loud. I hadn’t seen my sister this happy in a long time.

We walked to the edge of the field, which dropped sharply into the valley. A wind swirled up, tugging at us with invisible hands. Around us were scattered large boulders the colour of wet sand, and a small track wound between them down the slope to the village below, on a ledge halfway to the valley. A small voice in my mind reminded me that our parents might be back home by now…I imagined them walking in and finding our note saying we were going for a walk to Laitumkhrah. They’d worry, and pace the floor waiting for us to get back. Suddenly, the wind stung my skin in little pangs of guilt.

‘Shall we…’ I began.

‘Sit here?’ completed my sister, pointing to a large, flat stone nearby.

They made themselves comfortable and I had no choice but to join them. I wondered how long we’d stay out… Melvin lit a cigarette and pulled out a bottle of rum from his jacket pocket. He twisted off the cap and took a swig before passing it to me; I could smell the alcohol, strong and sweet. I hesitated.

‘Go on, take a sip, it gets pretty cold here,’ said Chris.

I looked at my sister but she was lighting a cigarette.

‘And,’ Chris added, ‘we’re celebrating.’

The rum burned my throat and, though I tried my hardest not to, I spluttered. Soon, a silver prickle travelled down my chest, and I was enveloped by warmth. I took a few more small quick gulps before passing on the bottle. I felt a growing tingle, a delicious exhilaration. I suddenly wanted to stand up and shout, ‘This is our right. To be happy.’ Around me, conversation was a distant murmur. They spoke of the album, I think, the artwork on the cover, the sequence of songs, and how it would be quite unlike anything anyone in Shillong had ever created before. As the shadows stretched long across the slopes, everyone fell quiet. From behind us came the sound of quick footsteps; it was an elderly man, carrying a khoh on his back.

‘Kumno, mama,’ called out Melvin. The old man nodded in acknowledgement, his face, though elderly, was smooth and unlined, his eyes sharp and bright like small river stones. We watched him walk carefully down the path to the village in the valley. He rounded a bend and then vanished behind a boulder.

‘Why is this place called Laitlum?’ asked Melvin suddenly.

‘It means where the hills are set free,’ answered Grace.

‘Yes, but why? Don’t you Khasis have a story for everything?’

‘I’m sure there is, something about a cruel giant, or evil serpent, or some person caught by spirits and water fairies. But who cares?’ she said, ‘Folk stories are rubbish.’

Chris sipped the rum. ‘Why?’

‘Because they have nothing to do with the world we live in, they’re not real.’

‘They might not be real to you, but…’

‘Look at what’s going on,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there time for folk tales when people are shooting each other across their own town roads?’

‘Perhaps that’s when they need them most.’

My sister shook her head. ‘Maybe once they taught people something about life, and how to live it but not any more. Now you figure things out for yourself, you can’t depend on anyone else to get you out of shit.’

We sat a long while in silence, listening to the wind, watching the way rising mist changed shape through the trees. It looked like faces, the ones you pass every day on the street, that turn their eyes away because everyone is a stranger in a town of careless bullets. At times, the mist fragmented like light on water, opening trails and doors and windows, settling into the bulky shapes of houses. It swirled like our feathered dancers holding swords and lamenting about an ancient tribal war; it tiptoed like women on the fringes, moving in slow, graceful lines. The mist was our history.

On the other side of the valley, the sun had shredded the sky and fallen behind the mountains. We watched the clouds bleed.

‘When you’re sitting here,’ said Chris finally, ‘all the shit in life seems far away.’

Melvin said he’d build a hut here, a stone cabin to keep out the wind and rain, where he could set up his drum kit… ‘And we’ll come live with you.’ My sister laughed. ‘We can play music all day…’

‘And drink,’ added Chris, holding up the near-empty bottle.

‘No one would bother us,’ Grace concluded. ‘It would be our own place.’

We stayed until light had almost completely faded, and deep shadows lengthened into the valley. The wind had turned cold and we rode back subdued, the bike lights barely dispersing the darkness.

The next year was a time of many changes. Anku came to see me once, when his father travelled to Shillong to take care of some unfinished business. They lived in Dibrugarh now, in the southern part of Assam. When I asked him what it was like, he said it was alright, that the good thing was he had many more people with whom he could play cricket. Since this was years before the Internet, and despite the exchange of a few letters, I never saw my friend again. We also got cable television—and I realized, while blearily watching MTV until the wee hours of the morning, that the song Chris had made Anku and I listen to on that faraway afternoon was Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’. It felt like the beginning and the end of an era.

Chris and my sister never broke up. But neither were they together. A few months after our drive to Laitlum, Chris and Melvin’s grandmother died. True to Khasi tradition, one they’d adopted as part of having lived in Shillong for many generations, the family gathered to ‘said jain’, to wash household clothes at Dwar Ksuid. As it usually happens in cases like these, accounts of the accident vary, but it was likely that Chris lost his balance on wet, mossy rock and slipped into the river. Despite being a good swimmer, he was caught in a strong current that pulled him under. His brother jumped in to try and save him, and for a moment it looked like he might succeed. He dragged Chris while trying to make for the bank, but it proved too far. They were both drowned. At midday, the time at which, they say, the water fairies call from the water. My sister didn’t emerge from her room for weeks, listening over and over to the album the band had released merely a week earlier. I’d sit outside my sister’s door, clutching a book, unable to understand how they could be gone.

The album received a small, enthusiastic response, but mostly people didn’t understand why their music didn’t revolve around love. Instead it sounded angry, speaking out against the world, and condemning it for its failures.

Such a stupid life.

Chris sang.

Such a stupid life.

My sister took the music to heart. After the accident, she refused to attend church, saying she’d been confused before, but now she was sure there wasn’t a god. My parents were at a loss, this time not knowing how to argue with her. Her friends, though sympathetic at the beginning, stopped dropping by. The parade diminished to a trickle. Mike made an appearance once or twice, but was desultorily sent away. Things did not improve for Chris and Melvin’s family. One by one, their businesses packed up and closed—the extortion demands from militant groups in the state were getting larger and bolder. It was unsustainable to keep their shops and restaurants open. Finally, my mother told me, they all left Shillong, probably for Calcutta, or Canada, nobody really knew. Laitlum, I heard, was eventually closed to the public—people drank there and got into fights despite the ‘Commit No Nuisance Here’ signboard nailed to the gate. Unlike the hills and mist, for us freedom doesn’t last a lifetime; it comes and goes on unexpected afternoons.

Sky Graves

I
t was mostly at funerals that people told stories. On the three night-long watches kept by the ieng iap briew—the household of the dead—when windows and doors stayed open for the spirit of the deceased. Sometimes a stool would tip over, a wooden shutter suddenly rattle or a tumbler fall to the floor. These were indications of a ghostly visit, some believed, mysterious signs that the one who’d passed away was making peace with the world they were leaving behind. On these nights, people whiled away the hours playing cards or carrom; in the kitchen women would splice betel nut and fold tobacco leaves for the next day’s visitors, they would talk quietly of the bereaved and the inconsolable. In a separate room, in a musty corner, a group of men would huddle around the chula, giving off warmth and light like a familiar, benevolent mistress. There were funny stories of drunks who wandered into empty churches and talked to stoic ceramic saints, of animal hunts that went heroically right, and sometimes tragically wrong, tales of journeys through jungles and wilderness involving characters they’d never met but who’d become real and intimate through years of retelling. Stories are told at festive, joyful gatherings, but the ones narrated at funerals are special because they reaffirm existence, of the listeners and the narrators. They are times of remembrance that haul the past into the present, and keep people alive even when they’re gone.

It wasn’t often that Bah Hem told stories. He would sit in silence, listening to the others, his eyes fixed on the glowing coal. On nights that were a trifle colder and quieter, though, he could be persuaded. If he’d had a drink—smoky rice beer or a sharp stinging glass of clear kiad—someone would ask for a story about love, and he’d speak of the man who came from the place where birds go to die. And like at the beginning of so many stories, the room would transform, assembled anew with words.